October 11, 2018

Hillary Clinton is squeezing some Shalala time into her upcoming Florida swing on behalf of Andrew Gillum.

Donna Shalala's campaign announced Thursday that the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate will host a luncheon fundraiser for Shalala on October 24, though the time and location is to be determined. Shalala and Clinton are close. The former University of Miami president served as Bill Clinton's Health and Human Services Secretary and led the Clinton Foundation from 2015-2017.

“It is such an honor to have Hillary coming to South Florida to support our campaign,” Shalala said in a release. “Senator Clinton has been my friend for 40 years, but more importantly, she is a trailblazer for women everywhere.”

Shalala is running for Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's vacant congressional seat against Republican TV journalist Maria Elvira Salazar, who has run a strong campaign despite the district's Democratic lean. Shalala raised over $1 million in the most recent fundraising quarter, a healthy sum that can fund additional TV ads against Salazar in the campaign's final stretch.

Clinton won 63 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade County in 2016 and won Ros-Lehtinen's congressional district by nearly 20 percentage points over Trump, whose performance in Miami-Dade was the worst by a GOP presidential nominee in decades. Clinton also won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary with nearly 75 percent of the vote over Bernie Sanders.

In Bob Woodward’s new book released on Tuesday, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” the veteran reporter wrote that Trump used the vulgarity to describe Haiti after a campaign stop in Little Haiti.

“The idea of ‘shithole countries’ was not a new one for Trump,” Woodward wrote. “During the 2016 campaign, Trump had visited Little Haiti in Miami. Former Haitian leaders had come to the microphones and accused the Clintons of corruption and stealing from Haiti.”

“After the event, in private, Trump seemed down. ‘I really felt for these people. They come from such a shithole.’”

The comments in 2016 came after a Trump campaign event where the then-candidate told Haitian-Americans they shared “a lot of common values” and railed against the Clinton Foundation’s spending in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

“Whether you vote for me or not I really want to be your biggest champion,” Trump said in prepared remarks. “Clinton was responsible for doing things a lot of the Haitian people are not happy with. Taxpayer dollars intended for Haiti and the earthquake victims went to a lot of the Clinton cronies.”

Michael Barnett, the vice chairman of the Florida Republican party who helped organized the Little Haiti event, said he will continue to believe the president when he says he didn’t say it.

"I am still willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt," he said. "I would like to know where these allegations have come from; who are the sources? Until I see any concrete proof, I am willing to believe the president when he says he didn't say it."

Barnett was tasked with getting the Little Haiti community to show up to the Trump campaign event. He said he doesn’t recall the president having any private meeting after and that “he got into his vehicle and left the cultural center. I don’t know where he went after that.”

Trump’s use of the vulgarity set off a barrage of criticism earlier this year when the president referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries” during a much-publicized January meeting on immigration.

But it wasn’t the first time Trump used the term, according to Woodward.

June 18, 2018

Hillary Clinton made an unsurprising endorsement in the Democratic primary to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, saying former Clinton Foundation director Donna Shalala would make an excellent Congresswoman if elected.

"I know she will be an excellent Congresswoman from Florida," Clinton told an audience of women in New York on Monday.

Hillary Clinton, speaking in NYC, endorses Donna Shalala, former Clinton admin official and candidate for Congress in Florida's 27th district: "I know she will be an excellent Congresswoman from Florida."

Shalala, who also ran the Clinton Foundation, introduced Clinton today.

It's not clear if Clinton would hop on the campaign trail for the former Health and Human Services Secretary and University of Miami President, who faces a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination.

Shalala faces former Knight Foundation director Matt Haggman, Miami Beach commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, former University of Miami academic advisor Michael Hepburn and former state Rep. David Richardson in the Democratic primary. Ros-Lehtinen's Miami-based district voted for Clinton over Donald Trump by 19 percentage points in the 2016 election, the most Democratic-leaning result of any congressional district currently held by the GOP.

August 01, 2017

Months after Democrats began calling him a top national target, Carlos Curbelo has drawn a serious 2018 challenger.

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who ran a stronger-than-expected state Senate campaign in 2016, will run for Congress. She plans to hold a news conference announcing her candidacy Wednesday.

“It’s shocking that the people in Washington are trying to strip healthcare from millions of Americans,” Mucarsel-Powell told the Miami Herald in an interview Monday, taking a jab at Curbelo. “The person that I’m running against voted for Trumpcare.”

She claimed Curbelo “has voted more than 86 percent of the time with Trump,” but also insisted: “I don’t want to focus my entire energy on what’s happening with the president.”

The bilingual Mucarsel-Powell, 46, was born in Ecuador, where she lived until she was 14. That’s when she and her single mother and three sisters moved to southern California. Mucarsel-Powell followed a sister to South Florida in 1996.

Now married with a stepdaughter, a daughter and a son, Mucarsel-Powell lives in Pinecrest, which is outside the 26th congressional district, a stretch of Westchester to Key West. She rents property in the Florida Keys, she said. Curbelo lives about a mile from the district’s boundaries in West Kendall.

After years of working in various nonprofit organizations, at ZooMiami and for Florida International University, Mucarsel-Powell opened a consulting firm on strategic planning.

For months, national Democrats have labeled Curbelo a top target, citing his district’s Democratic-leaning makeup. It favors Democrats by 6 percentage points, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, making Curbelo’s district the most Democratic in the country currently held by a Republican. Last year, Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the district by 16 points.

But Curbelo defeated Democrat Joe Garcia by 12 points, a 28-point swing showing Curbelo’s crossover appeal among Democrats and independents. He’s also a prolific fundraiser who had $1.1 million in his campaign account as of June 30 and consistently posts among the highest fundraising hauls of House members in both parties. Mucarsel-Powell said she expects to have to raise at least $4 million to compete.

Curbelo’s support in May for the American Health Care Act, House Republicans’ proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act, was political manna for Democratic Party leaders, who see the vote as one of Curbelo’s biggest electoral weaknesses in a district where 92,500 people get health insurance through Obamacare — one of the highest rates in the country. Republicans have already vowed to spend millions of dollars defending Curbelo and other Republicans in competitive districts who backed the legislation.

July 25, 2017

Raquel Regalado is officially joining the race to replace longtime Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is retiring from Congress next year.

The former Miami-Dade school board member and candidate for county mayor in 2016 filed her paperwork to compete in the Republican primary against county commissioner Bruno Barreiro on Tuesday morning. Nancy Watkins, a top Florida GOP political accountant based in Tampa, will serve as campaign treasurer.

"I'm running for Congress because we cannot afford to live in South Florida, because before we get to any other issue we need better paying jobs" Regalado said. "We can't afford to buy a home. We can't afford to live here. We can't afford to raise our children here. We're at a critical point, we need educated, reasonable, articulate and thoughtful people in Congress."

The 43-year-old daughter of Miami mayor Tomás Regalado can now start fundraising after Barreiro raised $176,000 in the most recent fundraising quarter. Maria Peiro, who unsuccessfully ran against Ros-Lehtinen in the 2016 Republican primary also announced her intentions to run, but has not filed yet.

Regalado is a self-described moderate Republican seeking election in a Miami-based district that Hillary Clinton won by nearly 20 percentage points over Donald Trump, making it the most Democratic district in the country currently held by a Republican. Ros-Lehtinen's retirement opens up a seat that national Democrats see as a prime pickup opportunity in 2018.

Regalado has a history of bucking the GOP. In 2010, she campaigned for Democrat Alex Sink for governor over Republican Rick Scott before unsuccessfully challenging Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Gimenez, a fellow Republican, for his seat in 2016. She also did not endorse Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election.

A slew of Democrats have announced or are weighing bids for Ros-Lehtinen's seat.

Correction: A previous version of this most misidentified Regalado's age. She is 43, not 42.

June 06, 2017

Over the weekend, the FBI arrested a suspected leaker for turning over classified documents that outlined the extent of Russian hacking efforts on voting systems, including an attempted hack on Florida officials, during the 2016 election.

But less than 12 months ago President Donald Trump encouraged the Russians to hack into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's emails during a press conference at his golf resort in Doral.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said to a room full of TV cameras at Trump National Doral in July 2016. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Since assuming the presidency, Trump has railed against "leakers" who provide anonymous information to news media outlets, arguing they undermine his ability to lead, after repeatedly promoting information from WikiLeaks during the campaign that was obtained through leaks.

During a rollicking hour of back-and-forth round of questioning from the press in Doral, Trump flippantly promoted the idea of Russian involvement in Clinton's email server.

“They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there,” he said. “So let's see.”

Trump surrogates characterized his comments as a joke after the speech.

Jason Miller, Trump's communications adviser at the time, said Trump was not calling for Russia to hack Clinton but to hand over emails to the FBI if they had them.

“To be clear, Mr. Trump did not call on, or invite, Russia or anyone else to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails today,” Miller said on Twitter. “Trump was clearly saying that if Russia or others have Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, they should share them.”

But in order for Russia to have the emails, the government would have likely needed to engage in hacking if Clinton declined to hand them over on her own free will.

The arrest of Reality Winner, a 25-year-old intelligence contractor, is the first leak case that led to an arrest under President Trump. The FBI said Monday that Winner had contact with a news outlet and the FBI announced Winner's arrest, which occurred last weekend, about an hour after national security website The Intercept published a story based on classified documents. The documents, which were partially redacted, outlined the ways in which Russian hackers attempted to obtain voting information using emails.

A Herald/Times story from September 2016 said the FBI was investigating a "malicious act" against election supervisors throughout Florida. There is currently no evidence that Russian hacking efforts altered votes in the 2016 election.

Barack Obama brought nine or 10 leak-related prosecutions during his eight years in office, about twice as many that were brought under every previous presidency.

January 17, 2017

Hastings will spend the day in his district instead, spokesman Evan Polisar said. Hastings, who lives in Delray Beach, represents portions of Broward, Palm Beach and Hendry counties. Hastings rallied African-Americans to support Hillary Clintonin 2016.

The other two Democrats who represent Broward -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston and Ted Deutch of Boca Raton -- will both attend the inauguration. Wasserman Schultz will attend the Women's March on Washington Saturday and is co-hosting a breakfast before the march.

Here is Hastings' statement:

“I have decided to boycott the Inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump and remain in my Congressional district in Florida. This decision is not a protest of the results of the Electoral College, but rather, an objection to the demagoguery that continues to define the incoming administration.

“President-elect Trump has done little to prove that he is ready to lead this country. Instead, he continues to champion divisiveness. The office of the President is not endowed with unquestioned loyalty, and it is the obligation of each and every American to speak out against injustices however big or small. I cannot play a part in normalizing the countless offensive comments that he has made throughout the past year.

“It is quite simply wrong for the President-elect to use his position of power to continue to make racist, sexist, and bigoted statements, to demean those who have spent their lifetimes championing civil rights, such as Rep. John Lewis, and to ridicule religious minorities, ethnic minorities, and anyone who looks different. President-elect Trump continues to denigrate the American intelligence community, jeopardizing the security of the American people, and has clear, undeniable conflicts of interest in violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, designed to prevent foreign influence over American elected officials. Make no mistake: these behaviors are not, nor can they ever be, considered normal.

“President-elect Trump has made it clear that when given the choice, he stands with Vladimir Putin. I choose to stand with Rep. John Lewis, and every American that expects our President to serve with compassion and humility. If the Trump administration continues to champion illegal, unconstitutional, or other ideas that put the safety of the American people at risk, it will find no harsher critic than me.”

But it was a story about race and murder statistics that we wrote in 2015 hat drew the most clicks in 2016. Our story explained that FBI data shows that whites usually kill whites, and blacks usually kill blacks. In recent years, these statistics have repeatedly drawn interest in the aftermath of high-profile shooting deaths in which race was a factor.

Here’s a look at the most-clicked on fact-checks and articles we published in 2016 from PolitiFact Florida.

December 28, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump’s business record and Hillary Clinton’s email practices were some of the most contentious issues of the 2016 election — and some of PolitiFact’s most popular reports of the year.